July 8, 2010

Bangarang 2.0 alpha available

A source tarball for the alpha version Bangarang 2.0 is available here.

This alpha phase will be a relatively subdued affair. It mostly intended as a nearly-feature-complete sneak peak for fans of the app. As our team is very small and our bandwidth is limited, we’re focusing our efforts on getting to feature-complete and into a more formal beta testing phase at which point we can focus on bug-fixing and polishing. A more detailed release announcement will accompany beta and final release.

Of course, this is pre-release software and, as with all such software, it may have an unpredictably voracious appetite for kittens and puppies and all things of universal cuteness and value.

Important: If you elect take a look at this alpha release, the first thing to do is to go the “Media Lists” view and select Advanced>Update Ontologies from the dropdown menu in the upper right. Bangarang 1.x stored media information in the nepomuk store using a draft version of the nepomuk shared desktop ontologies that was not ready at the time of the 1.0 release. The tool updates the way the information is stored to properly use the latest released version of the ontologies. This will take a while depending on the size of your collection. After this is run your media information should show just fine in the app.

Special thanks to Stefan Burnicki for the immense help provided so far.

About subtitle support, is’t still coming to 2.0 or will it be postponed to 3.0 or something? And when it comes will it support styled subtitles and such? Kinda must have when it comes to watching anime. But yeah, this is by far the most interesting KDE mediaplayer project, so keep up the good work and thanks!

Subtitle support will depend on the capabilities of the phonon backend. I originally thought to add support for external subtitles independently, but became aware of external subtitle support being added to phonon. One of the principles of the project is to use the KDE pillars, the benefits of which are that it will provide visible use-cases for the hard work being put into the underlying technologies. So, we’ll add as much subtitle support as is provided by the phonon backend. Right now that means DVD subtitle support. We’re looking at what other subtitle support exists in phonon and will support as much as possible out of the gate.

I apologize if this causes disappointment, but I wanted to err on the side of supporting and expanding the full capabilities of the KDE platform.

Ohhh, that it very unfortunate, as DVD watching is probably not the most common use case for a PC media player. Ripped DVDs or Internet downloads are.

I realize for Americans subtitles may seem like “another special feature” that only a subset of users want. But you must realize that there are countries where people *only* watch the original version of movies, so not having them shuts out *entire* countries.

As pointed out, another use case is anime watching, though *that* one really *is* a niche case.

I really, really like Bangarang’s UI style and goals. I’ll begin using it as soon as it has subtitle support.

Yeah, I’m bummed about releasing 2.0 without full subtitle support. Rest assured, I don’t consider subtitle support a special feature. For me it is essential. It is also for that reason why it *needs* to be supported in Phonon, so that the functionality is available across the entire desktop. In the short term it might make this app more appealing, but in the long term I’d rather provide solid app-level use cases for the work being done lower in the stack. It’ll get there, I just have to hold my breath a touch longer.🙂

It is fully translatable, and some translations have been added already (since 1.0 in fact). In an ideal world, the KDE localisation teams would all do he translations but because Bangarang is hosted outside KDE it won’t happen for every language. But still, progress is being made, check the list: http://gitorious.org/bangarang/bangarang/trees/master/translations

BTW, what else do you expect me to do?😉 Your strides showing us how the power of the platform mean some powerful features that only were to be expected in Amarok, for free, have brought a lot of homework to Amarok itself. I’ll test how my mileage varies in 4.5 RC2.